Bodice Tipplers

I read this when I was a kid and it gave me VERY WEIRD KID IDEAS. Now I'm returning to it and it is... even more fucked up than I expected? Nora is one of those freshly orphaned smart Vicky Holt girls. Charles Herrick, aka the Lynx, is a... brilliant sex monster? It's hard to explain. There's another dude too. And a whole other family. Is this even a romance novel? Is this maybe a thriller? I DON'T KNOW ANYMORE.

This is going to be okay for most people but there's definitely an extremely controlling man, there's an attempted rape that ends up with the woman safe but the man's brains splashed all over the outback, there's a good bit of murdering but mostly, you know, the genteel kind. No sex at all, overtly.

Can we appreciate this cover for a minute, though? I love a good "women running away from houses" Gothic cover, but this one is really a fine example.

Ayla is an anatomically modern human (is it technically Cro Magnon? This is set in modern day Ukraine. To the Wikipedia!) orphaned and raised by a tribe of psychic Neanderthals. This one isn't the one with all the doin' it (evidently that is Valley of the Horses which also has a bunch of blonde dudes who shop at Cave-REI), it's the one with a ton of rape and abuse in it.

Jonathan, allegedly hot bad boy of Springfield, fakes his death and flees with his also-fake-dead baby daughter to start a new life away from the clutches of bazillionare Alan Spaulding. Will he find love with Tammy, fellow Radiohound fan? Or will her Bad Dad literally fucking kill them all? LET'S FIND OUT in this, I kid you not, Guiding Light book which came out in hardback.

Chelsea is an ordinary high school girl, obsessed with boys and the saxophone and her diet.... until a new kid comes to school. Will Chelsea's first date become her last date?! Will the roving gangs of greaser punks take over the 90's? Why does this diner close at 7? Find out with this thrilling episode where we take on a Fear Street book!

There is no sexual assault (and indeed no sex) in this book, but there is the constant threat of random violence from literally every guy in town. Stay indoors! Lock your doors! Do not date!

Y'all I don't even know, this is about an 80's lady with fake boobs who dies and gets stuck being a fairy godmother for an 1890's-era girl in Colorado.  I swear this is the god honest plot of this book.

This WOULD be delightful but in fact it's alarmingly full of some insanely intense fat shaming, plus some shockingly evil family emotional abuse, including hella gaslighting.  Seriously, this is supposed to be a light and frothy book!  And it is!  But if any of that sounds like it's going to bother you, the light and frothy tone of it is going to make it a lot worse for you.  The fat shaming gets to insane and hysterical levels (I don't mean hysterical like ha-ha.)

I think Jude Deveraux is accidentally letting her own body issues slip out, because she makes the enormous mistake (heh) of telling us exactly what this woman weighs.  Please understand that she's supposed to be so fat that the whole town feels a little sad revulsion when they see her out in public.  (Not that any weight would make that okay!  Obviously!)  But this poor girl is a whopping ONE HUNDRED SIXTY TWO POUNDS.

The Hood by Carin Rafferty:  It's 1992!  She's a treasury agent!  He's an... accountant!  A white savior accountant!  Just read it, okay?  This white boy plays basketball in his Daisy Dukes in it, it is amazing.

Guess what, y'all?  It's a very special crossover episode!  We got together with the ladies from Textual Tension and all four of us had to read this piece of crap that Fabio "wrote" so we hope you appreciate what we do for you.

So.  This book.  Jesus fuck.  He's named Ryder Remington (yes really) which is kind of all you need to know.  She's masquerading as a tavern wench to investigate a disappearance.  In, get ready, Charleston.  You know we love it when these books go to South Carolina.

Nobody actually gets sexually assaulted in this book but there's a lot of aggressive bullshit, kidnapping, blackmail, ahistorical jabronis, etc.

Because we did this one in two different states the sound quality is a little off.

Did you know that Fabio had a line of clothing sold at, I shit you not, Sam's Club?  HE DID.

Did you know that this already-embarassing book to carry around came with a goddamned centerfold, completely unrelated to its content?

For this episode we read the first Dark Shadows tie-in book about Barnabas Collins.  It's weird and uncomfortable and very much unlike the show you guys like so don't @ us.  Nobody get raped but lots of people get bitten and murdered and it's generally kind of unpleasant.

This crossover is also our last episode as part of the Collinsport Historical Society podcast.  If you want to keep listening to us, of course we'll always have our episodes here on bodicetipplers.com, but we'll be a lot more searchable on all of your podcast aggregators under our own name.

So here's part two of our epic Flowers in the Attic episode, wherein we invite a Very Special Guest to explain what happened in the rest of these bugfuck crazy books and then run out of tape. 

Neither Sara or I had read this book as teens even though ALL of our friends had. We were the “too cool” girls which really meant we were painfully uncool.  Both of us recall this book being proudly displayed in the halls of our middle and high schools. V.C. Andrews was the most popular girl at any school during the 80s and 90s. She could have been crowned queen at a 114 different proms. In terms of who could generate a loyal army of teen girls it went Johnny Castle from “Dirty Dancing” and then V.C. Andrews’ for creating the “Dollanganger Series.”